A SHORT HISTORY OF THE FUTURE

We have remained individuallytoo greedy to distribute the surplus above our simple needs, and collectively too stupid to pile it upin any more useful form thantraditional mountains of arms

- Jacob Bronowski'swordsremain as true of the human condition todayas theywere when they were first written for his bookThe Commonsense of Sciencein 1951.

Loosener and Davies contend persuasively that the ‘clockwork universe' concept helped to shape our materialistic world, formed on the belief that everything proceeds in the cosmos according to fixed laws. The job of science was to establish just what these laws were and to learn how to manipulate them.

The journal Scientific American released a special edition (vol. 293, no. 3, September 2005) to bring the world up to speed on the critical situation we find ourselves in today. The title, Crossroads for Planet Earth, says it all. The way we solve the simultaneous crises—such as our response to climate change, the unsustainable and growing levels of extreme poverty, the emergence of new diseases, the growing shortages of food and fresh drinking water, the growing chasm between extreme wealth and extreme poverty, and the unsustainable demand for energy—will chart the destiny, or seal the fate of our global family that is estimated to reach a staggering 8 billion by 2025 - Gregg Braden

He goes on to say - Science as a discipline has, of course changed. Einstein provided totally new perceptions of space, time and gravity. Quantum physics implies that the apparently solid does not exist, except as energy. ‘Particles' appear to come into existence out of nothing and as mysteriously disappear again.

Chaos theory, contending that systems which normally appear to be ordered can be perturbed by factors impossible to assess, depicts a universe of partly ordered events, partly of unpredictable ones.

A major part of the scientific view is toward the idea that the cosmos is organised on apparently random (dare we say it?) lines which may best be understood intuitively, rather than by reductionism and linear thinking.

As Richard Dawkins points out, the best way to understand how a motor car engine works is to break it down into its component parts and understand them. Whether this ‘reductionist' principle is a tool one can apply to all areas of enquiry is now seriously in question. Many studies have been carried out into "unconscious thinking" -intuition - leaving little doubt that the brain can sort information and present answers to problems without the owner of that brain being consciously aware of what is going on.

Eighteenth century botanist, Carolus Linear, wrote of ‘a great chain of being, a chiefly ordained and immutable hierarchy of life which among other things, established white Europeans as a superior race, with the right, even the mission, to dominate `inferior' races.

Are we bringing history to an end?

climate change

Observing any one of several individual but critical trends suggests that, without rapid and positive action, history may have only a very short way to run.

Whether it is the growth of world population, of greenhouse gas concentrations and the accelerating rate of climate change, the running down of oil and natural gas reserves, growing shortages of fresh water for agriculture, industry and domestic use, or the increasing difficulty in controlling epidemic diseases -we are facing a mounting global crisis that will peak in less than a generation, around the year 2030.

Taken together, these trends point to a potentially apocalyptic period, if not for the planet itself then certainly for human Societies and for humankind.

In this compelling book, an update to The 2030 Spike, Colin Mason explains in clear and irrefutable terms what is going on - largely below the surface of our daily or weekly news bulletins.

Indigenous Native American Prophecy (Elders Speak part 3)

The picture that Colin Mason paints is stark, and yet it is not bleak ...

but as this Native North American elder has said in the context of acknowledging the absolute need for a moral dimension to Corporate Social Responsibility ...

IS universally recognized as the man who gave the world the “Gaia Theory”.

James Lovelock - A Final Warning: by Nature Video

Lovelock, however, is not going quietly into that good night, but is burning and raving at the close of day, and is now one of the most effective voices warning us about the dangers our world now faces from the climate change transition that we are now experiencing.

This is an excellent book, short, well-argued and the work of a man who has thought long and hard about our problems.

He is dismissive of “Greens” and those who believe that driving hybrids, recycling rubbish and reducing our C02 emissions will now make a difference.

As Lawrence Bloom expressed it, we are not going to see a “reboot” of our system, and according to Lovelock we now have to look beyond the misery and pain, that we inevitably face over the coming decades, to a world where a much smaller human population survives on those parts of the planet that are not too hot for human life.

This is an inspirational book, a call for action, and a basis for hope. We have entered a window of opportunity that the author brilliantly illustrates using the concepts of chaos theory. Dr. Ervin Laszlo is a unique scientist who founded systems philosophy and general evolution theory. But he is also the founder and president of the Club of Budapest, an informal association of highly creative people who use their insight to enhance awareness of global problems and human opportunities.

The book starts with a Chinese proverb that warns, “If we do not change direction, we are likely to end up exactlywhere we are headed.” The author then summarizes the problems the world is now facing and their causes. He emphasizes that we are at a critical juncture in history. We now face a “decision-window.” We are headed on a path towards global breakdown where societies will experience accelerating terrorism, crime, wars, intolerance and an inhospitable biosphere for human life. Thus, there will either be a global breakdown of civilization or a breakthrough to a better future for our children and us.

INDEED, the more we learned about change and the future, the more we found ourselves asking the question: Can our existing spiritual and ethical structures—both traditional and contemporary—equip us to handle the enormity, the speed, the complexity, and the overwhelming nature of the changes we're undergoing? Changes that may shortly take us, as you will see in the interviews that follow, far beyond our current capacities of imagination.

As a first step toward finding the answers to these questions, we spoke with a number of scientists, evolutionary thinkers, and futurists, who each view the world of change from a slightly different perspective. From biologist Elisabet Sahtouris's microscopic empires of warring bacteria to inventor Ray Kurzweil's intravenous brain-enhancing nanobots; from futurist Jeremy Rifkin's deathblow to the oil age to Barbara Marx Hubbard's birth of a new consciousness, each contributor opens a unique window into the many dimensions of our changing life conditions. Whether the subject of discussion is as large as our universe or as small as a nanotube, whether it's as tangible as petroleum or as ephemeral as consciousness—one thing you can count on is that it's ALL changing. And just how much and how fast is something that all of us, like it or not, are about to find out.

But we are not without hope. The problems that confront our planet and our humanity – environmental tension, social and family dysfunction, economic instability, and political unrest – give us an opportunityto pause, recognize, re-examine the sources of our suffering, and find a path that can lead us towards a brighter future and to an even brighter present.

This is the basic formula that the Buddha used during his own lifetime to guide his fellow beings to tend to their suffering. This basic formula can help guide us now, to our own salvation. The three distinctively Buddhist virtues of mindfulness, concentration, and insight can lead us to this salvation. Applied appropriately and skillfully, they can help us discover a global ethic and a mindful way of living that can guide the development of our society towards a more sane and healthy direction.

Tit for tat - I will comment to your blog as you so generously sent me a link to it while making comments to mine.

I’ll definitely be looking for this book. It looks very interesting, thank you for sharing.

The process of scientific discovery is a double edged sword… It looks like we want to know how everything works, but instead of wanting to know for knowledge’s sake, we’ve taken that process a step further by believing that we can control and manipulate what we observe, somewhat indescriminately. Although technology has advanced tremendously, the cost has become prohibitive enough that the Earth itself has begun to reject our manipulation of it.

That being said, I still believe that science can be (and is) a wonderful and joyful part of our material existence, provided that our own hubris does not get the better of us.

Well apart from my own catalytic / production role - in establishing the mechanism by which each and everyone of us 6.5 billion on earth will have the opportunity to understand the paramount need for actionon ALL the fronts which Colin Mason espouses - we could do no better in the meantime than pay heed to Paul Hawken's view that - sustainability is not enough and that the holy grail must be restoration.

… and EVEN MORE SO since Al Gore’s UN Climate Change Conference statement, in Poznan, that …

“It is wrong for this generation to destroy the habitability of the planet and ruin the prospects of every future generation. That realisation must carry us forward. Our children have a right to hold us to a high standard when the future of all human kind is hanging in the balance.”

“The political systems of the developed world have become sclerotic. We have to overcome the paralysis that has prevented us from acting and focus clearly and unblinkingly on this crisis rather than spending so much time on OJ Simpson, Paris Hilton and Anna Nicole Smith.”

THAT IDEA, an idea which embodies an understanding of global collective wisdom, has been most eloquently described by Helen in her zBlog@gaia; and the underlying TRUTH of both Colin Mason's Short History and Rob Hopkins' Transition movement IS THAT Climate change is only half of the story and that developing an understanding of Peak OIL is similarly essential. As Rob Hopkins has said …

”Together these two issues have been referred to as the “Hydrocarbon Twins”.They are so intertwined, that seen in isolation, a large part of the story remains untold.”

ALAS a ”MISUNDERSTANDING” OF THIS FACT IS YET AGAIN MANIFESTED by an INABILITY OF OUR SPECIES to ACCEPT that ”CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING!”

IT IS NOT just about holistic thinking

IT IS about an acceptance of theinfinite consequencesof the interdependence of independence within that holistic thinking …

and no better example of those infinite consequences has been the GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS. Greenspan himself has now realised that you can change the system but you can't change human nature.

I would say that unless we change human nature NO THING will change and our species will reap its fate rather than sharing in its destiny.

” Oil depletion presents a unique set of vulnerabilities and risks. If policy makers fail to understand this, the resulting policies may leave nations mired both in internal economic turmoil and external conflict caused by fuel shortages, to the point that the pursuit of international climate policies becomes much more difficult than is already the case.Thus while policy makers may assume that, in addressing the dilemma of global Climate Change, they are also doing what is needed to deal with the problem of dependence on depleting petroleum, this could be a dangerously misleading assumption.

On the other hand, if nations were to try to mitigate the economic impacts of oil depletion by producing large amounts of synthetic petroleum from coal and other low-grade hydrocarbons, the climatic effects could be catastrophic.

Fossil fuels have delivered enormous economic benefits to modern societies, but we are now becoming aware of the burgeoning costs of our dependence on these fuels.The human community’s central task for the coming decades must be the undoing of its dependence on oil, coal, and natural gas in order to deal with the twin crises of resource depletion and climate chaos.

It is surely fair to say that fossil fuel dependency constitutes a systemic problem of a kind and scale that no society has ever had to address before. If we are to deal with this challenge successfully, we must engage in systemic thinking that leads to sustained, bold action.”

is actually a mis-quotation of the original text written by George Santayana, who, in his Reason in Common Sense, The Life of Reason, Vol.1, wrote …

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

Rooted in the philosophies of Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and many others to follow, his biography (1863-1952) and more contemporary intepretations and observations about man and life can be found at Wikipedia by searching for George Santayana. Stanford University online also provides an outstanding and much more detailed background on this important and profound philosopher, essayist, poet and novelist.

Santayana's quotation, in turn, was a slight modification of an Edmund Burke (1729-1797) statement …

“Those who don't know history are destined to repeat it.”

Burke was a British Statesman and Philosopher who is generally viewed as the philosophical founder of modern political conservatism.

IT IS of course nothing to do with remembering or indeed choosing not to remember or ignoring the lessons of the past or our destiny to repeat those lessons or being doomed to do so; IT IS a matter of knowing that history is the history of amalgamating an ever increasing amount of information, which constitutes the exponentially expanding interconnections and consequences of the WEB of LIFE of our multiverse of parallel universes; and understanding that THE paramount requirement of our species, IS to positively act on our experiencesof that informational data, in a wholly compassionate, mutually beneficial and holistic manner such that our destiny is indeed achieved and our fate averted.

of watching crude soar even as we languish in stagnation. This never used to happen. If we faltered, energy costs would fall too, acting as a stabilizer. This harsh new reality is going to become uncomfortable when the emerging world enters a new cycle of growth, leaving us behind. Rising utility costs have already raised the numbers of UK households in poverty from a fifth to a quarter.

The journal Scientific American released a special edition (vol. 293, no. 3, September 2005) to bring the world up to speed on the critical situation we find ourselves in today. The title, Crossroads for Planet Earth, says it all. The way we solve the simultaneous crises—such as our response to climate change, the unsustainable and growing levels of extreme poverty, the emergence of new diseases, the growing shortages of food and fresh drinking water, the growing chasm between extreme wealth and extreme poverty, and the unsustainable demand for energy—will chart the destiny, or seal the fate of our global family that is estimated to reach a staggering 8 billion by 2025 - Gregg Braden

Do we then conclude that for all intents and purposes a global climate catastrophe is inevitable?

On first sight, this is plausible, but not on a deeper look. How reasonable is it to assume that when pushed beyond safe limits only the natural systems of the planet breakdown and not the human systems? The current economic-financial-industrial system pushes the planet’s ecologies beyond humanly favorable thermal balances. But this system has its own limits, beyond which it cannot function. There are multiple such limits, economic, social, political, even cultural, and many of them are close to critical thresholds.

The operational limits of the global financial system may be the most critical.

The global financial system rests on self-created quicksand. When banks lend to other banks or financial institutions, those funds are used as a basis for further lending, and each transaction is larger than the one before. Interest has its own interest, and money breeds money. The greater the amounts and quicker the transactions, the more money is created. The amount of money in the system has grown exponentially. Computers decide in milliseconds the buying and selling of millions and billions of dollars worth of financial instruments. With so much money available, and with the ease and speed of global transactions, trade in derivates and other forms of financial gambling has progressively detached the financial system from economic and social reality.

A draft of a major report on climate change, due to be published next year, has been leaked online. Climate-sceptic bloggers have seized on it, claiming that it admits that much of global warming has been caused by the sun's variability, not by greenhouse gas emissions.

Current climate models (simulations) based on estimates of increasing CO2 and, to a lesser extent, by decreasing sulfate aerosols, predict that temperatures will increase by 1.4-5.8°C (2.5-10.4°F) between 1990-2100. This is a somewhat wide range; however, it is difficult to predict CO2 emissions because of the number of variables involved. Some climate studies have shown that, even in the absence of the CO2 emission variable, global climate will increase by 0.5°C (0.9°F) over the next one hundred years due to warming caused just by the ocean. In addition, models predict that sea levels will rise by about 10 cm over the next century.

You can view it as a technology race or a joint venture in the common interest.It hardly matters which. If the Chinese can crack thorium, the world will need less oil, coal, and gas than feared. Wind turbines will vanish from our landscape. There will less risk of a global energy crunch, less risk of resource wars, and less risk of a climate tipping point.

Certainly, picking an exceptionally hot year from the past to suggest that the world is not warming is like asserting that summer will not come this year because the mild weather of the past week is about to be replaced by a cold snap.

The only honest way to make comparisons is on a longer timescale, and on that basis it is clear that every decade since the 1960s has been warmer than the previous one, and that average temperatures have increased markedly over the past century.

But it’s also true that over the past 15 years or so, the rate of warming has slowed down.